Aerospace Engineers Salary and Pay

The national wage ladder (BLS OEWS, May 2024)

Percentiles answer the question a single average cannot: where would a given Aerospace Engineers offer sit among all 68,440 workers doing this job? The survey top-codes at $239,200+ and withholds unreliable cells, shown as n/p in the table.

Employment and concentration

The occupation employed 68,440 people in May 2024, 0.04% of every job BLS counted. California is the largest employer at 9,330 jobs, and the leading three states between them hold 33.2% of the workforce. Concentration peaks in Alabama, whose location quotient of 6.00 says this work is 6.00 times as dense there as it is nationwide.

The spread matters as much as the center. Earners at the 90th percentile make $205,850, which is 2.4 times the $85,350 at the 10th, a difference of $120,500 annually. Because the mean wage ($141,180) sits above the median ($134,830), a typical offer should be judged against the median and the 25th to 75th percentile band, not the mean.

Pay by state

Every state with a publishable estimate is in this table, 42 of them, sorted by jobs. The pay leader by median is District of Columbia at $175,350; the jobs leader is California:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Aerospace Engineers stands number 332 by employment and number 49 by median pay. Inside its own major group, Architecture and Engineering Occupations, the group median wage is $96,690 across 36 detailed occupations, so this occupation pays 39% more than its group median, and it supplies 2.7% of the group's 2,567,220 jobs. In 13 of the 42 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $134,830, which is the single best quick test of whether this occupation's pay is set nationally or locally: a high count means local markets regularly outbid the national figure.

Metropolitan areas: where the jobs and the pay sit

Los Angeles-Long Beach-Anaheim, CA is the largest metro employer with 6,090 jobs, 8.9% of the national total. Two rankings follow across the 86 metros BLS publishes for this occupation: where the jobs are, then where the money is, with the pay ranking restricted to metros employing at least 500 people in this occupation to keep small samples out of the lead.

Largest metro employers

Highest-paying metros (500+ jobs)

At the other end, Hartford-West Hartford-East Hartford, CT posts the lowest mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs, $116,970 a year, against $164,540 in San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, CA. The lowest-paying large metro and the highest are both real markets for this occupation; the difference between them is the geography premium, or penalty, in cash terms.

What the median pay looks like as a budget

As a household number, $134,830 a year is $11,236 a month gross, $5,186 every two weeks, $2,593 a week. Moving from the 25th percentile ($104,740) to the 75th ($174,480) is worth $69,740 a year, which is the realistic size of the experience and specialization premium inside this occupation. The next step from a gross figure is a net one: run the $11,236 monthly figure through the paycheck calculator applies your state's taxes, the salary calculator compares two offers in any unit, and the raise vs inflation calculator tells you whether a nominal raise is a real one.

To place a real offer: a salary of $148,313 would sit between the median ($134,830) and the 75th percentile ($174,480), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $104,740, is $30,090 under the median, the typical size of the discount attached to entry-level or low-cost-market postings in this field.

Related occupations in Architecture and Engineering Occupations

Sibling occupations in Architecture and Engineering Occupations: Electrical and Electronic Engineering Technologists and Technicians, Computer Hardware Engineers, Industrial Engineering Technologists and Technicians, Engineering Technologists and Technicians, Except Drafters, All Other, Civil Engineering Technologists and Technicians, Surveying and Mapping Technicians. Medians there are computed identically, so the comparison is apples to apples; the full set lives on the Careers hub.